In this episode, my friend Krista Bontrager shares her testimony of being healed of bipolar disorder. Krista suffered symptoms of depression all her life. After attending seminary and becoming a professional theologian, her life began spiraling out of control and that's when she discovered the keys to her freedom. If you know anyone who suffers anxiety, depression or bipolar, this message is sure to give them hope.ResourcesFreedom EncountersKrista's WebsiteKrista's Youtube channelKrista's Twitter pageKrista's Facebook pageSpiritual Warfare by Karl Payne
We're talking about life as a child of God and all things related to His Kingdom.
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Now let's jump into this week's show.
Hello.
Hello, Krista.
How are you doing?
I'm doing all right.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
It has been a long, long time since we talked.
Yes.
And we keep threatening to do this interview, but it never happened.
And here we are.
And here we are doing the interview.
That's right.
Luckily, I had stayed home today to get some work done, so I was around, so it worked out.
Well, that's cool.
Hey, your hair looks awesome.
Oh, thanks.
I spent a lot of time on that.
That's a good look for you.
I don't have that problem.
So you have a very interesting story to tell.
We talked on the phone, gosh, back in the summer.
Was it June or July?
Yeah, it was June.
It was a while ago.
And you told me the crazy story of getting set free of some demons and healed of bipolar.
Yeah.
Now we get to share your story with a whole bunch more people.
Yeah, I'm excited.
Me too, because your story is really encouraging.
You know, in the ambulance, I transport so many people who suffer from depression and bipolar, and it just breaks my heart because I really want to see these people healed and set free, but it seems like, gosh, how do you do that?
How does it happen?
What's the process like?
So were you raised in a Christian home?
I was.
I was raised by my mother.
I was raised back in the 70s when I was a child, and divorce wasn't nearly as prevalent as it is today.
But my mother raised me, and she's one of my heroes.
I was born an extremely crippled child, physically crippled.
So I had a lot of obstacles to overcome right from the beginning.
My parents divorced very early in my life.
My dad was not really involved in my life.
But my mother had come from a very strong Christian family.
I'm a fourth generation minister in my family.
Really?
Yeah.
My great-grandfather was a minister in Holland.
And then my grandfather was a minister and a church planter here in California.
He planted eight or nine churches and most of them are still going.
And then I have an uncle and two aunts who are all ordained ministers.
And then myself, I'm a trained theologian.
And so I have a strong heritage in the faith.
And I kind of jokingly say it's sort of the family business.
On some level.
It really is in your DNA.
Yeah, and so I had a very lovely childhood with my mother.
My mother worked very hard.
She was a school teacher and she made my life very beautiful considering it was just her and I and we had a lot of obstacles and we weren't always well off monetarily, but she worked really hard and I got a very good education because of her efforts.
That's cool.
So tell me a little bit about the disabilities that you were born with.
Yeah, I was born with bilateral hip dysplasia, which basically means I had no hip sockets.
And now it's just a standard test that they perform right when you have a baby.
They'll do a thing where they kind of move the legs to see how they move in their hip joints.
It's just a standard pediatrician test that they do now.
And I don't know in my case if it just wasn't performed or it didn't register, but they didn't know I had this problem until I was about two years old and I still wasn't walking.
And then I finally started walking and my mom immediately knew something was wrong.
I just I had no balance.
I couldn't walk very well.
And so that started a series of events in my life where I was hospitalized for a very extended period of time and I was put in totally immobilized in traction so that they could set my hip sockets correctly.
They would put weights on my legs every day and spread them further and further apart and then I was put in a full body cast from my armpits down to my knees and so I couldn't move.
I was completely immobilized for nine months in that body cast and then I wore leg braces until I was probably like kindergarten, first grade.
And it was able to be corrected without surgery, which was a praise.
When the doctors first diagnosed me, they actually told my parents that I would probably never walk correctly, and I went on to awkwardly play sports throughout my childhood.
So you're not a marathon runner, but you're doing okay.
Yeah, exactly.
So I still kind of limp around a little bit, but it's just part of what makes me unique, and I just praise God every day that I can walk, and my mother had the courage to Go through all of these procedures so that I could do that, but that medical experience actually played a role in, I think, some of the early seeds of my mental illness because it disrupted the natural bonding between my mother and I. Because you were in the hospital?
I was in the hospital, and then I wasn't really able to be touched or held when I had all of these things on my body, this cast and everything, and it was really difficult.
It took me a long time to understand the impact that those medical situations early in my life that I honestly have no memory of what role they played in kind of emotionally get me getting me off balance and doing damage to me.
And then I think those seeds that were planted during that time did play a role in later in in my mental illness as I as I got older.
Yeah, as I've worked with people who have mental illness, you know, bipolar, depression, or whatever it is, it's becoming pretty clear to me that a lot of the genesis of those things are in the formative years, first two to three years of people's lives, where They don't really have an ability to process and comprehend what's going on around them, especially difficult situations or emotionally traumatic situations.
Yeah.
And I think that the way that that kind of showed up for me was that I often wondered like if I had been abused or something that I just didn't remember because I would register, you know, I would take these little tests on like, you know, have you had a traumatic event in your life?
And I couldn't really remember anything, but I would always have problems with attachment issues.
I had a lot of anxiety.
And it wasn't until I was in my 30s that I, when I started going to therapy, that I realized that I really have like a serious attachment disorder.
How did the depression affect you growing up, going through elementary school, middle school?
I always struggled with depression.
I think even in childhood, I felt very isolated and different.
I had difficulties making friends.
I just sensed that I was not like other children and I had far more needs.
I was a needy person.
My needs just never felt like they were met.
And again, it wasn't until I went to therapy in my 30s that I realized like, oh, this is classic attachment disorder, but I didn't know that as a child.
And so often the feedback I would receive from peers growing up even through high school and college was just I was a very needy person.
And I never knew quite how to take that in or what that meant.
And I just knew I was different than other people.
And I was very depressed when I was 15.
I was a freshman in high school.
And I I was extremely depressed to the point of becoming suicidal.
And I just thought about killing myself all the time daily.
There was really a time in my life as a freshman.
It was February.
of my freshman year.
And I kind of picked like a date when I was going to kill myself.
And I went to school that day.
And a classmate of mine that I didn't really know all that well, I went to a fairly small school.
So we all sorted knew each other, but he wasn't like my friend or anything.
He didn't know anything personal about me.
But I was putting my books away in my locker.
And he comes up to me and he says, Hey, you know, I want to talk to you after school.
He's God told me something.
He gave me a word for you.
And, and, you know, let me explain.
I'm the Baptist girl.
I don't know anything about people getting words from the Lord.
And so I was just, I knew that that was the day that I had planned to kill myself later in the day.
And I, so I thought, well, what have I got to lose?
So I went to meet with this guy after school and he tells me, you know, the Lord told me yesterday that you wanted to kill yourself today.
And so he shared the gospel with me, and I ended up really making what I would say is my real profession of faith.
Although I had grown up in the church, and I believed in Jesus, but I never believed that Jesus loved me back.
I was just so emotionally broken because I think of these attachment problems that I had.
I couldn't conceive that God could actually love me.
Did you think that you were unlovable?
I pretty much did.
I had massive rejection issues.
I felt perpetually worthless.
And you probably figured if my friends and people around me can't stand to be around me, God sure probably doesn't love me either.
Exactly.
Because he knows stuff that people don't know.
That's right.
And he knows about my sin and all the things I think I'm hiding from other people.
So when I came to Christ that day, it was really the first time I knew that God loved He had told this guy that I didn't even really know, hey, I value you, and he gave me a prophetic word of God has a plan for your life, and God's gonna do something really great with you.
And that single word brought life to me.
A life-changing word of knowledge.
It was.
From a stranger.
It was.
Isn't that crazy?
That is so crazy, and he didn't come back to my school the next year.
He moved away to Idaho.
I've never been able to find this guy, but him and another gal really were formative at that very beginning in getting me filled with the Holy Spirit and getting me on my way.
I only knew them for a couple of months, but that foundational experience set me up to get me through a lot of really difficult times in my life that were coming.
Because you had some very difficult times coming.
I did, yeah.
When were you first diagnosed with bipolar?
Yeah.
Was it later?
Yes, much later.
I was diagnosed when I was 35.
Well, let's go back to your teenage years because then were you diagnosed with depression?
No, I didn't.
That was also later.
Yeah, I didn't even know anything about depression or mental illness or anything.
So you weren't going to counseling or taking any medications through high school?
No.
When I went to college, I went to a Christian university and I struggled with that transition into college and my friends were wise enough at the university that even though they didn't know me very well and they just met me and we were all freshmen together, they knew I was deeply troubled.
And they recommended that I go to the counseling center at the school.
And one of them even like said, I'll walk with you over there.
You know, she was, she was really had the vision of what could happen there for healing wise for me.
So I went, started going to counseling at the University Counseling Center, and I did that for a few years.
And I did work on some issues, but overall, I didn't really see much progress at that time.
But I did make it through college.
I did well.
I graduated with honors.
Then I went on to seminary.
And for me, seminary, I know seminary takes a lot of a bad rap for a lot of Christians.
They call it cemetery and they say they make fun of it.
But for me, that was such a life giving experience because I discovered that God made me for a purpose.
And that purpose was that I was a gifted teacher, and that I could teach other people theology.
And theology, for me, became sanity.
Right, because the key thing that you have to understand, if you're going to overcome anything that the enemy is trying to throw at you, you have to know what your purpose is for existence.
If you don't know that, you're pretty much way behind in the game, and you figured that out in college and seminary.
So my senior year of college, I had a great theology professor and he really encouraged me.
And so then I went on to seminary and one of my seminary professors kind of pulled me aside one day and said, Hey, have you ever thought about doing this as a career?
And I thought, this is a career?
Me going to school?
I don't, I'm confused.
I didn't even know what a theologian was.
I didn't understand the world of academia.
I was just taking classes because The structure helped me deal with what I didn't understand was a mental illness.
Right, now I'm guessing this was a fundamentalist perspective that you were being taught.
Broadly fundamentalist, not harshly fundamentalist.
But not charismatic?
No, not charismatic, no.
And the structure of the classes and learning about who God really was helped correct a lot of misunderstandings I had about God.
So the more truth I got in me, I noticed that my thoughts could become more ordered the more that I studied theology and logic.
And so even if I had a chaotic internal emotional life, I learned how to kind of restructure my thought life by using theology, philosophy, and logic as a way to kind of self-medicate in a way.
And I think that my Christian upbringing helped me because it did put some boundaries in place of certain places I wasn't going to go.
I wasn't going to take drugs.
I wasn't going to engage in risky sex.
I wasn't going to become an alcoholic.
All of those things seemed like I could do them, like sin was crouching at my door.
And if I ever went down that path, I knew I would have problems.
But something in me knew that if I ever Try to go drinking.
I would be an alcoholic after like three drinks and I would be living in the gutter.
That's really interesting and you touched on the second, what I would say is the second pillar of good mental health.
Number one is knowing who you are and knowing something about your purpose and your destiny and why God created you.
Number two is knowing some things about God that are true because most of the people that I They either have no sense of who they are, and they also have a lot of wrong beliefs about God.
And if you can start to get your understanding of who God is and who you are straightened out a little bit and untangle some of the mess, it becomes a lot easier to deflect the arrows of the enemy which are coming at you 24-7.
For me, that was a very powerful drug, if you will.
That was how I made it through my 20s, was really trying to correct my thinking, and I noticed that there was relief in that.
I had my first child when I was 29.
I had anticipated a career as a professional theologian, like Teaching at the university.
But thankfully, in God's grace, he had a different plan for me.
And he sent me my daughter Emily, who is now 16.
And she was an amazing gift to me, but she was also an incredible disruption to my mental illness.
And as is very typical with mental illness, major life transitions tend to cause the person to kind of go down a rung.
You know, my first year of college, My first year of teaching, my first year of being a mom, all of these things kind of helped me spiral down, and that's very typical.
And I struggled with being a mother.
I loved my child deeply, but my inner life had become incredibly chaotic, and I was extremely depressed and suicidal.
Right.
Well, if you struggle with depression already, The specter of postpartum depression is hanging over you.
Yeah.
And I know a lot of people who've never had depression in their life, but once they had their first child, they struggle with postpartum depression for years afterward.
It was a very dark time for me.
And then I had my second child in 2003, and then that was just another rung down the ladder.
And by that point, I was almost non-functional.
Working a little bit, but mostly relying on my husband.
I was extremely depressed.
It was difficult for me to care for my children.
I was just mostly trying to hang on in my day-to-day life.
And I'll never forget my husband, who is a very patient and long-suffering person, sitting me down on our bed.
and saying, you know, hey, you got to get some professional help.
This isn't working for me.
I was extremely resistant at the time.
I thought, well, I'm not the problem.
What's the problem here?
Denial.
Yeah, denial.
So, yeah, pretty much classic denial.
Well, now he also was struggling himself.
Yes, and we didn't really completely understand the depths of that at the time.
But, yeah, he had struggled with low-grade, long-term depression for most of his life as well.
I think in the beginning one of the reasons we were actually attracted to each other was that we both had some similar struggles, and we found comfort in each other that we could kind of help each other.
You know, we had both felt isolated childhoods, and we had both been kind of different, And we have both suffered from from depression only we didn't know that that's what that was.
But there were enough things that about us that were similar that that was part of the attraction.
But then as often happens is one day you wake up and you realize I don't think I want to be sick anymore.
And you try to start getting better and it's hard if you're not both in that process of getting better.
What often happens is one spouse wants to stay sick and the other one wants to get better.
That's sometimes why divorce ends up happening.
But for both of us, we've both been in long term struggles with mental illness and just didn't know it.
And he had gone to many therapists off and on.
When I knew him in college, he had gone to one.
And then when I was in graduate school, he went to another one.
But he had found very little relief.
No, did he take any kind of antidepressants?
He did not.
And it wasn't until in his mid-30s.
He tried a couple of times, but he just didn't get any relief from it.
In fact, it just made things worse.
And so it wasn't something that he was really that interested in pursuing.
I'm going to put in a little plug here, just a warning basically.
I am an advocate of people taking their medications if they've been prescribed antidepressants and if the antidepressant is actually helping you when you're on it, I think you should stay on it.
I see way too many people who go off their medications because they don't like some side effect and the next thing you know, they're in the emergency department because they slit their wrist or they took an overdose.
That's the good word, yeah.
I always recommend to people, look, Until you find the ultimate solution, if prescription medications are helping you, just keep taking them.
I totally agree and I'm always a big advocate for that as well.
And like I said, when my husband came to me and wanted me to go to therapy, I was resistant.
It took me about six more months before I actually called the therapist and another six months before I actually started going.
But once I started going, I went to therapy One to two times a week for 10 years and I had a very good therapist.
I'm a very big advocate that if a therapist is not working for you, switch therapists.
Keep trying until you find somebody that you click with and that is competent.
The therapist I had was a Christian and she's extremely competent and very smart and I needed someone who was a little smarter than me So that I couldn't just lie to them.
That's awesome.
But it was a very positive experience and I learned a lot.
I grew a lot.
It was useful.
I became stabilized and then she was the one that recommended that I finally go to a psychiatrist and see about medication.
She was the one who said, you know, I think you might be depressed.
And I just said, I don't think I know what that is.
And she says, she gave me a referral to a psychiatrist.
So I went to the psychiatrist and he gave me a long intake.
He asked me questions about 45 minutes to try to really zero in on the problem.
And that's another thing I recommend that if somebody is struggling with mental illness, If you go to a psychiatrist and they don't ask a lot of questions, they just want to prescribe medication, you probably need to switch your psychiatrist.
You need somebody that there's some psychiatrists that are just what I call pill farms.
They'll just give you the pills.
They don't hardly even try to diagnose you.
And it's very important that people ask questions of the patient to really zero in on it because there's not a lot of, you know, there's no blood tests they can give you that you're bipolar or whatever.
It's not like that.
So they have to ask enough questions to get to a diagnosis.
So at first, he diagnosed me as being depressed, put me on antidepressants and I got better.
I got a lot better.
And for the first time in my life, I started thinking more clearly and I thought, wow, this is this is amazing.
I never knew this was even possible.
And things really started going better for me at work.
I got a promotion.
I was able to work more.
I started speaking more.
And then 10 months after I started antidepressants, I had the worst Crash of my life.
I was in Hawaii on a business trip.
I was on a speaking trip and I started having hallucinations about knives being on the wall and they were attacking me.
They were flying in at me and I was having overwhelming thoughts of killing myself and I just was trying to make it through the trip so that I could go home and go see the doctor and find out what was going on.
And I got back and I was immediately, it was recommended that I check into the psychiatric hospital and I was in the psychiatric hospital for three months after that.
So I went from the highest of highs to the lowest of lows and it was a long road back after that.
But that hospitalization in 2005-2006 is when I received my diagnosis finally, the correct diagnosis.
That I was actually bipolar and not just depressed.
Okay.
Now, your manifestation of bipolar is a little different than kind of the classic, which is you have these real high manic phases where you're talking a million miles an hour and everything is great and you have the strength of Superman and then, bam, you crash into these really low depressive states and you go back and forth between them.
Yours wasn't like that.
Most of the emerging research recently in the last five years is the theory that bipolar is actually sort of a spectrum disorder, much like autism.
Right.
And so it can manifest in different ways and to different degrees.
The classic bipolar, which a famous example might be Patty Duke or Carrie Fisher, they're more classic bipolar people and they now classify that as being bipolar type one.
Where you have the highs of highs and the lows, the low lows.
The type of bipolar that I had is called type 2 bipolar, which is long term depression with short spikes of manic episodes.
And my manic episodes might last between three to seven days.
And the way that my manic periods would manifest was usually through I would be able to write an extremely volumous amount of words, shall we say.
So you had extreme motivation to write?
Yes, and so in 2005, when I was at my worst, I had three major cycles in 2005, and I didn't know that that's what they were until I crashed in October of 2005.
I wrote like three books in one year.
I wonder if I have bipolar.
I got a journal article published.
I mean, that's what I said.
I went from the highest of highs.
It was like success was finally clicking for me.
I remember when I was in the psychiatric hospital, the psychiatrist asking me, well, does what you write make any sense?
And I said, oh yeah, I got a journal article published.
And you know, I got this other book published through my, my employer and it was like, but I was driving my coworkers crazy because I would just, just write all this stuff.
And then of course they would have to edit it and figure out how to produce it and what they were going to do with it.
And I wasn't a very good team player because I was just sort of in my own little bubble of, you know, this is what I'm doing.
And so that was a, it was rough for my coworkers.
It was rough for my family.
I was just really out of touch with them emotionally and physically.
I was just kind of in my own little world, but one of the things that made my bipolar so difficult to diagnose is I was real Untypical in that I didn't take drugs.
I wasn't an alcoholic.
I hadn't been in jail.
I was still married.
I had had the same job for over a decade.
You were a very high-functioning bipolar.
Yes.
Because most of the people that I know who are bipolar, they're not high-functioning.
Their life is a mess, and they can't cope.
Yeah, and I understand that, and I was always on the edge of that, and I don't think I could have kept it up for very much longer.
I think I was just really into like keeping certain social conventions.
And so I, I was able to sort of maneuver my way through it.
But again, I think that that's where my work in my intellectual life also helped me in and having those logic skills.
But I went on medication in 2005.
And I was big proponent of that I wanted to be the poster child for being responsible with your Treatment, and taking medication, and being steady about that, and not going off, and going to your therapy appointments.
If people look me up, they'll see I was featured in Charles Stanley's In Touch Magazine as being a mental health advocate a few years ago.
I'm a big proponent of that.
You were on medications, and then you had the crash.
Then I got the right diagnosis.
Then you got the right diagnosis of bipolar.
So they put you on different medication, I'm guessing.
Right.
So how that works is that antidepressants is good for what's called unipolar, which is depression.
Bipolar is you've got to regulate both the highs and the lows, and that's a different classification of medications.
That's mood stabilizers.
So I was put on a mood stabilizer and was on that faithfully until about 15, 16 months ago.
Okay, so you went off.
What were you taking just out of curiosity?
I was on lithium.
Lithium?
Yeah.
Okay.
And that was pretty much the only thing that I was on.
I did take anxiety medication too, but on an as-needed basis.
It wasn't a daily thing.
It was just as I had anxiety attacks, I would take it.
Did you suffer any side effects from lithium?
I did, yeah.
Every medication I've been on has had different side effects.
I was on Depakote for many years.
I had a lot of weight gain that I still struggle with when I was on Depakote.
That was one of the more difficult side effects for me.
I had a lot of problems sleeping.
Sleeping was a big issue.
I had issues when I was on lithium as well.
Strange dreams a lot of the time, which now I kind of have a different thought about that on this side of my experience, but those really didn't start until I started taking lithium.
But yeah, there were side effects.
Every medication I had had its pros and cons, but I always felt like I would rather deal with that, stay married, be with my kids, not be in jail, so I was willing to tolerate.
It's a trade-off.
Yeah, exactly.
So what prompted you to seek deliverance?
Well, my marriage was falling apart about 15 months or so ago.
My husband and I were just at the end of what we could do.
And he's a good man.
But things were falling down pretty quickly.
And we had been married for over 20 years.
He was just tired of dealing with me, with the illness.
He was angry.
He was resentful.
He had his own issues.
It was just every day was difficult.
We were disagreeing almost every waking moment.
There was just a lot of low-level resentments, unresolved conflicts, just even talking about simple things and dealing with the children was difficult.
And I think both of us just had kind of reached the end of ourselves.
My illness had been hard on him.
There had been things that I had done early in our marriage before I had my diagnosis and I was rough with him and there was damage that was done there and I was very unstable emotionally and I think he had tried to hang in there with me as long as he could, but he had kind of reached the end of what he wanted to do.
Even though I felt I had made meaningful progress in therapy and I had changed and I had repented, I think from his point of view, too much damage had been done and he couldn't move past it.
He couldn't move past it.
He couldn't see moving forward with things being the way they were.
It was either things had to make a dramatic change or it was going to be over.
Kind of in that space and in those very difficult conversations, one of my co-workers, who's a very courageous man, and he had been my prayer partner for a few years as I'd been in a difficult marriage, and he had just been very kind to me and praying with me every so often as I needed it.
He came to me one day, and he knew my situation.
He knew it was getting worse, and he says, you know, Krista, have you ever considered that Maybe the problems you and your husband have are not really what they appear to be, that maybe there's something more there.
And I'm like, I have no idea what you're talking about.
And so then he's saying, well, you know, if you were considered that maybe that's a spiritual dimension that, you know, this is a demonic assignment to your marriage.
And I'm thinking like, wait a minute, that's my line.
I'm the theologian.
What are we talking about?
And I just didn't even know I mean, of course I believed in demons.
I believed in Satan.
I had taught demonology in theology classes.
I mean, I knew all the Bible verses, but for me it wasn't a reality.
It wasn't experiential.
So, he gave me the name of a ministry.
Actually, what he did was he contacted the ministry.
And then he just gave me the name of the local person, the local deliverance minister.
Now, was this Freedom Encounters?
Yes, it was Freedom Encounters.
They're in Idaho.
I will leave a link to their website in the podcast notes.
So it's Ken and Sylvia Thornburg, and Ken Thornburg has been involved in deliverance for, I don't know, 30 or 40 years.
And he is a pioneer in emotional healing, too.
I love his stuff.
They're an amazing couple, and so they have ministers all over the world, so people don't have to go to Idaho.
There's probably somebody in their area that ministers through Freedom Encounters.
So my friend, my co-worker, Give me the information for the local person here in Southern California.
And I just gave it to my husband and I said, look, I don't know if this interests you.
This is sort of a last gasp for us.
But if you're interested in going through this prayer ministry, you know, here's the number, basically.
And ironically, I just gave it to my husband, not even thinking about myself, just gave him the number and my husband reached out to them and He called and they have a little process that they have you go through because they want you to be able to keep your deliverance when you're done.
So you have to go, you have to watch some, some videos, some instructional videos from the Thornburgs to understand kind of how you've gotten into this situation and how, what they're going to do to get you out of it and then how you're going to walk in that and keep your deliverance.
And, um, so my husband went through that process and I saw such a dramatic Transformation in him that then I thought I think I want to do this.
And so I went through the process a few weeks later and my husband and I kind of have a standing agreement of whatever one of us does spiritually.
We're kind of in it together and we both do it and we've done that throughout our marriage.
So I went through it and I was not expecting like The issue of mental illness to come up because in my mind, that was a medical problem.
You had not made the connection between the two?
Not at all.
And you're probably still a little bit in denial.
I'll try that on.
But I think that when I when I got down there and in the prayer, and this starts coming out, in my case,
The bipolar and the attachment issues that I've struggled with since childhood and all of these things, the anxiety, the post-traumatic stress disorder that I suffered with for years, all of that was in some way a provocation of the enemies at work in my mind.
So I'm going to ask you to unpack some of this in as much detail as you can.
So they asked you to fill out a pretty comprehensive questionnaire, didn't they, before you went in?
No, it's just a one-page checklist.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, and so you just go in there, and the way that Freedom Encounters does things is you don't need to give a lot of backstory, because their philosophy is the Holy Spirit knows everything.
So they do spirit-led things, whatever the Holy Spirit reveals, they kind of address those issues?
Yeah.
There's two parts to the prayer ministry.
The first part, the first day is what I call the casting out.
It's the casting out of the demons.
And then the second day is the Holy Spirit kind of ministering to you and beginning to heal you and fill up all of those broken places.
And that's kind of the inner healing component.
Okay.
So you got down there and it was casting out day.
Yeah.
So not knowing what was going to Come out not knowing what was going to be there.
Just so your listeners understand, the approach of Freedom Encounters is to address only the head demon.
They're only talking to one demon.
And their approach is that the demonic realm works kind of like an army.
So they're going to go for the general.
And all of the other soldiers will fall in line.
Do whatever that general does and follow him so their approach is that they just approach and talk to the head demon and You as and this is not I don't want people to have like visions of the Hollywood exorcist You know, my voice didn't change or my head didn't spin backward or anything like that.
It was just me reporting the thoughts of That were brought to my mind.
So as the deliverance minister would speak to the head demon, then I would report what was being said or the thoughts in my mind.
So the, you know, many of the reports in the beginning were designed to get me to be skeptical of the process.
Um, you know, this isn't going to work.
I don't have to do what you say.
She belongs to me.
Uh, there were some curse words in there that we won't repeat, but it was a lot of sort of defiant reports.
And so I'm just reporting what I'm hearing in my mind and I'm thinking, this is crazy.
You know, so there's like my own thoughts that are happening over here is I'm the theologian who's analyzing this and trying to make sense of what's happening.
And then there's the demonic thought of, Was that the first time where you actually realized that there are some other voices I'm hearing that are definitely not mine?
Oh yes!
That was quite a revelation for me because I think I went into it like, okay, I'm open to this.
I want to have an open mind.
But there was a part of me that was still very skeptical that I had any problems.
Well, look, you were taught and you taught in your theology classes.
You probably taught that Christians can't have demons.
I don't know if I ever taught that, but I think that I kind of thought that.
I don't think I had really given it much thought, but that was my general operating assumption and where I had come from.
And I'm not even really sure where I got that idea.
But yeah, I think that was probably my operating assumption.
One thing that was actually very helpful to me, and this will help your listeners who are not charismatics, who are more like coming from the background that I had, is I read a very helpful book a few months before I went through deliverance, before deliverance was even on my radar.
The Lord brought me past a book called Spiritual Warfare by Carl Payne, and he's a deliverance minister in Seattle.
But he comes from the same flow of Christianity that I do, which is as a conservative Baptist.
And I have found his book to be very useful with non-charismatics.
Now, I have a question.
Yeah.
If I'm not mistaken, he is the chaplain for the Seattle Seahawks.
That's correct.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I actually downloaded his book and I read it.
Yeah.
I didn't find it very helpful because I come from a charismatic background.
I found that book incredibly useful, because it opened that realm up for me in a way that spoke my language and made sense to me.
I don't think I ever would have gone down this path if I hadn't encountered Carl Paine's book in the first place.
And that book probably couched the discussion in a way you could receive it, because he's a theologian too.
Yes.
So that was kind of a first step for me.
Then I went through the deliverance, and then when I'm down there, You know, they go through this prayer, and the way that the Freedom Encounters does the prayer is it's fairly structured, but they do kind of have an interrogation of the head demon.
So think of it as... I love it.
They interrogate the head demon.
Oh, yes.
Think of it as like you've captured... There are a lot of ministries that do not like to interrogate demons, because they think, well, all demons are going to do is lie to us.
Well, that's not true.
Demons can lie to you, but some of the information they give is true, and some of it is very helpful.
It is very helpful.
Think of it as like you've captured the general in a war, and you bring him into the interrogation room, and you've got the head of the CIA or the FBI You know, they've got him under the light and, you know, they're asking him the questions.
They want to know, hey, what was your strategy?
What were you trying to do in this person's life?
How were you working out?
And they asked very specific questions to get at that.
And think of it as a courtroom where the Holy Spirit is forcing that demon to tell the truth.
Right.
So let me ask you this.
When they were asking the questions, Did you hear the demon talking or did the demon talk through you?
Because it happens both ways.
Some people, the demon actually speaks through them and sometimes the person hears the demonic voice and says whatever they hear.
I was just reporting the thought of what I was hearing.
So he had minimal control of your physical body?
I think there were some things that he had physical control over.
Were you doing things involuntarily?
There were some things I definitely struggled with.
Toward the end, my medication stopped working toward the end, even though I was still taking it.
It was like I told my husband in the three weeks before my prayer, I said, it's almost like I'm not taking my medicine, but I am, but I'm experiencing all the symptoms I had before I started.
And so it was like they were, they were scared.
They already knew that they were about to be, Homeless and they ratcheted up the activity exactly that's really common with that.
I've found with Demons is as they start to understand that their time is short Yes, they start to create all kinds of trying trying to scare you trying to frighten you to stop the process Anything to stop to get you to stop going down this path right of freedom.
So I The prayer took quite a long time.
It was four or five hours.
There was a lot to interrogate, but the plan that came forward was, we've put this in place with the mental illness, the anxiety disorder, the trauma.
We've sent abusive people into her life to abuse her, you know, and so this was the plan as they had been unfolding it almost from the beginning of my life.
This is going to be a little bit of a shock to some people, but a lot of people don't understand that demons actually co-labor with each other to draw certain people together who are dysfunctional to just create more turmoil and more problems.
I'm absolutely convinced that as much as Jesus loves children, To that degree, demons will do everything they can to send abusive people into a child's life with purpose, with intention, to screw that child up.
I think that they collaborate quite a bit.
The experience that I've had since my own deliverance in working and ministering to other people to help them get free, I just see that as a pattern over and over again.
Get them when they're young.
In comparison to other people that go through Freedom Encounters, you know, on average, a prayer might be about two hours.
Mine was about five hours.
I had a lot of activity, apparently.
So, you know, I drove home that night and I had a lot of doubts.
I had still a lot of thoughts of, like, nothing happened.
I don't get this.
Okay, so hang on.
Did they, like, get rid of the head demon?
Yep.
And did you sense it leaving?
And other demons went with it.
Did you feel any, physically or emotionally, spiritually, did you feel any different when this session was done?
My husband, in his session, noticed it right away.
He was, he, for him, when they did the casting out, the relief was immediate.
He noticed that he just felt lighter, freer.
His mind wasn't as cluttered.
He noticed an immediate release.
For me, it wasn't until really the next morning when I woke up, and it was the first morning that I ever woke up in my conscious life, and I didn't want to die.
I didn't have what I call a death message.
Because every morning I would wake up and the very first thought I would have every day is, today's a good day to die, or I want to die today.
Something along those lines.
That was my first thought when I opened my eyes in the morning.
And when I woke up that next morning, and I didn't have one of those death messages, I was like, I'm free.
It's over.
And that was really my first kind of, I think something really happened.
Did you notice the lack of voices?
Yeah.
A silence?
Yeah.
And was it uncomfortable?
Only for a few days.
But I can hardly remember it now.
I talked to a woman who went through deliverance and she had been so used to the voices talking to her that after she got set free and after the demons left and there was this really unusual silence in her mind, she couldn't take it and she invited the demons back.
And that does happen for some people.
And I'm not sure I understand enough about it yet why that happens.
For some people, but for me it was I think the only uncomfortable part was I finally believed I was going to live.
And so now I had to figure out how to live because my whole life I had spent most of my energy trying not to die.
Trying desperately just to survive.
Yeah.
And now for you survival is a given and now you have to figure out what am I going to do.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So that was the uncomfortable part of it for me.
When I had that thought, it was a few days after my deliverance, and I remember texting my deliverance minister.
I was like, now I have to live.
Wow, that's a totally new thought.
I've never had that thought before.
Time to make plans for the future.
Exactly.
So you fairly quickly went into telling other people about what happened.
No, I did not.
I told eight people.
Brave I told my eight closest friends and Even then it took me about a week Before I told them and then I just kind of sent them all a note and said hey I want to let you know what's been going on because these are people that have been on this journey with me for some of them for decades they knew me as a child and So I didn't come out as
to kind of my next circle of friends for nine months.
And then I didn't really come out publicly until I had been free for almost a year.
Because I really wanted to have kind of some medical verification of what you concern that people would be skeptical.
Oh, yeah, your claims.
Oh, yeah.
Because I mean, let's think about it a minute.
Mental illness, bipolar and demons.
I mean, that's that's like the, you know, the trifecta of, hey, you know, maybe you should have got off your medication.
That would be a good title for a book.
So it was I wanted to be very careful in how I presented it.
And I did a presentation in my Sunday school class at church.
And that was really kind of my first step of faith of Presenting it and I presented it to a group of non charismatics at my church And these are people some of them were my Sunday school teachers when I was a child They still attend the same church.
I went to as a child and I thought if I could come out to these people I I'm gonna be okay So so is that the video that I saw in Twitter that you had a link to probably yeah So you gave your testimony and they recorded it and then you uploaded that to yeah, I think yeah, I have some A teaching series on my YouTube channel, you can go to TheologyMom is my YouTube channel, and I have a series of three teachings called Real Life Spiritual Warfare.
And in that, I kind of unfold the theology, and then in the theology, I unfold my story.
I will put links in the podcast notes to your YouTube channel and your Twitter, a place if people want to follow you there.
Yeah, that'd be great.
So, how do your colleagues view you now?
I should probably explain.
I work at a Christian ministry.
I've worked in the realm of apologetics for two decades, specifically in science apologetics for going on 17 years.
I work with a team of research scientists, basically, who are also pretty big in the realm of science apologetics.
The reactions of my co-workers has been very gracious.
I'm sure that the day that I told my boss, who's a physicist, who I deeply, deeply respect, I'm sure that he was a bit skeptical, but now that so many months have passed, and I haven't taken time off like I normally would for mental health issues, and I've been off medication, and he's seeing the fruit of it now, I think that there's going to be some growing acceptance of that.
I love my co-workers, and we're like family.
And they have seen me through definitely the highs and the lows.
And my employer could have easily gotten rid of me a decade ago when I was completely unstable, unmedicated and untreated.
But they stood by me and they've given me a chance to redeem myself and do better and grow and given me the space to do that.
And I'm I'm very grateful for that.
And the fact that now that I've transitioned into Health is all the better for them.
How's your productivity compared to before?
Yeah, so it's interesting.
I used to use being bipolar and having a manic episode as like kind of an excuse almost to be more productive and, oh, I needed it in order to be creative.
You just got a week of jet fuel.
Yeah, exactly.
So there was a little bit in the beginning I was kind of worried, like, am I going to be as productive?
Was being manic like my secret sauce for how I would get stuff done?
Well, there are a lot of people I know who will take some of the I have a friend who has Asperger's and we were having a conversation and she's been having problems with relationships because she doesn't pick up on the subtle humor and some of the things that people who don't have Asperger's are aware of.
I asked her one day, I said, if God wanted to heal you of Asperger's, would you want to be healed?
Her first response to me was no.
Because she felt that Asperger's gave her some kind of advantage in life that other people didn't have.
It made her smarter.
It gave her other abilities.
And she initially said, no, I wouldn't want to be healed.
But then as we talked about it over the next week or so, I said, you know, when God heals you, He doesn't take away anything that's positive from you.
He only fixes what's broken and what's negative.
And if you want to be healed, I think He will heal you.
You can maintain the uniqueness without, you know, losing what you like about your personality.
And I would kind of agree with that.
I think that my boss has Asperger's, the founder of the ministry that I work for, he has Asperger's.
And I know that it has played a huge role in His ability to think in very unconventional, unusual ways and to see connections between ideas that to the rest of us, we're not really so sure there's a connection there.
And sure enough, 10 or 20 years later, research comes around to his way of thinking.
So it is interesting.
But I would I would qualify that I don't view Asperger's as being a mental illness.
It's it's I view it as being like kind of neurodiversity or, you know, it's a different neurological functioning.
But that's not to say that God can't heal that because I definitely think that, you know, there's something there that could be looked at in a healing context.
But I'm always careful to not put mental illness and Asperger's in the same bucket.
Yeah, they're apples and oranges.
Yeah, they're a little different.
But I think that what I've learned in the last 15 months is that working now filled with the Holy Spirit and being able to think more clearly, I work way better than I ever did in my best manic episode.
I get better ideas now.
The Holy Spirit, when I'm at work and I need help, I'm constantly in a conversation with the Holy Spirit of, you know, how can I handle this or what's an idea I can do to a solution for this situation?
And I totally attribute that to my calm mind that I have now.
and that I can really hear the Holy Spirit's voice now so much more clearly.
I can tune into it.
Whereas before, when I would have a manic episode, I might have a hundred ideas, but they would always be going in all these different directions, and it was really hard to discipline my thoughts.
Now, if I just stop and I pray and I ask the Holy Spirit for direction, I find that my ideas are actually of a higher quality and they're more organized.
And so, there's definitely been a shift and some changes there, but I've learned to appreciate that having the Holy Spirit is way better than the best, most epic manic episode that I ever had.
Yeah, I can only imagine the difference in that now you're not giving any headspace to all the demonic voices and the chatter and all the noise that they create.
That distracts you and causes you to lose focus and all that.
Yeah.
It's got to be just amazing.
Yeah.
And I feel like I can love my co-workers better because there's more space for them.
Whereas before, I was just very difficult to work with because I had so many ideas.
Part of the way my bipolar would manifest is I would have this idea this day and then this idea the next day and then a week later I'd want to change this direction and it was driving them crazy.
So, it's much better now.
That's cool.
So, if you could give advice to someone who suffers from depression or bipolar, what would you tell them?
Well, the first thing I would tell them is get some professional help.
Make a commitment to going to therapy.
Make a commitment to seeing a psychiatrist and try to get stabilized.
I think that we make better decisions when we're stabilized and I think that people can get genuine relief.
We live in a wonderful age of modern medicine and We ought to give that a shot, you know, and get stabilized because there's a lot of people I interact with.
They're just in such chaos from their mental illness that they can't even think straight and they can't make sound decisions.
And so if a person has tried a therapist and it hasn't helped them find a different one, I would say try a different one.
Yeah.
If they've tried a medication, it's not working.
Try to find a different one because there are a lot of different medications.
There's a lot of options these days.
And if you don't feel like you're, medical practitioners listening to you, get a different one.
And definitely do not get psychotropic medication from your general practitioner.
Go see a psychiatrist.
Oh, that's interesting because a lot of the people that I know who are getting medications for depression, they're just getting it through their GP and they've never actually seen a psychiatrist.
I would not recommend that because there's more new... GPs don't know how to properly diagnose for mental illness.
I always recommend to people go see a psychiatrist first, get a proper intake, get a proper diagnosis to see if there's conflicting conditions or other things that you need to be made aware of.
And if you're going to go to therapy, I always tell people make a two-year commitment to going to therapy every week because if you just go to therapy for a few weeks and then I commonly hear like, oh, it didn't work for me.
Well, how long did you go?
Well, we went for four weeks, six weeks, whatever.
It doesn't work like that.
Therapy is not magic.
It's whatever you bring into it, whatever you put into it, whatever truth you're willing to look at about yourself is how much you're going to grow and how much you're going to benefit from it.
And I always tell people if you're going to go to therapy, Make a two-year commitment and go once a week, and you're going to make huge progress in two years.
And that's really about how long it takes for therapy to begin to work.
It's a big commitment, but I find over and over again that people that have taken that advice, they make the most progress and they get the most stable.
So what about deliverance and inner healing?
If people are at a place where they're noticing that medications are not working for them, for example, there's a situation with a gentleman I've been ministering to where he's been on literally at least 30 medication changes and it consistently just doesn't work for him.
That's a good indication to me that it's probably time to consider some good deliverance.
Maybe there's some other demonic things in play.
So if you're on medication and it's not working, that's a great time to begin to press in for deliverance and inner healing.
I think that inner healing and deliverance actually is something that is available to anybody who struggles with mental illness.
And it's there and it's available if people want to press in for it.
But I also know that there's a lot of people who don't feel comfortable with thinking that their mental illness is a result of demonic activity.
And I've been in a lot of those conversations where they don't even want to entertain that as a possibility.
So then my advice to those people is at least go get medication and go to therapy and help your family and not bring down your family.
At least be medically responsible.
But I think that everybody, if you struggle with anxiety and depression especially, there is a ton of hope to be totally free of that through inner healing and deliverance.
And I'm glad you're mentioning both.
Because I think both are important.
Both do something different and sometimes I see people only go through deliverance or only go through inner healing and I really think that for maximum results it has to be a both and.
Yeah, I agree.
It's been my experience and my opinion that I think every person walking the face of the earth could be living in a greater level of freedom and identity if they went through At least a couple of hours of emotional healing and deliverance, probably more.
I find it really difficult to imagine anyone who has reached the age of 25 or 30 years old who hasn't suffered significant emotional trauma in some way, shape or form.
Whether it's through breaking up with boyfriends and girlfriends, parental abuse, I know so many guys who struggle with pornography, and when you start digging around in their past, most of these guys have experienced sexual abuse as children.
Even if you don't have a mental health diagnosis, whether, you know, anxiety, depression, or bipolar, whatever, most of the people that I know, they have some behavior that they're engaging in that they would like to get victory over, and it seems like no matter what they do, they can't get victory over it.
And I have found that deliverance and inner healing is really, really powerful.
For transforming your mind and getting rid of those patterns of thinking and the behaviors that you can't seem to get rid of any other way.
Yeah, I totally agree.
I mean, if people are struggling with habitual secret sins that they just can't seem to break or habitual anxiety that they can't seem to get out of, to me, that's always a big red flag of, hey, there's more freedom available for you here.
What I find is really the hang-up is how much freedom does that person want to press in for?
That's usually the biggest limitation.
It's not the mental illness.
It's not the addiction.
The biggest obstacle is there's usually something they don't really want to press in for that yet.
They're not ready or they're afraid or they don't know what's on the other side of that.
Yeah, that's the thing that I see a lot is people are very reluctant to go down these pathways because they're afraid of what they're going to run into or They are thinking it's going to take too much time, or it's not possible.
I mean, for me, I believe that Jesus is our role model, and I believe that unless you're walking in the kind of power and authority and freedom that Jesus walked in, you probably could benefit from some renewing of your mind, some deliverance, some emotional healing, and further work that the Holy Spirit wants to do to get you to a better place.
I totally agree.
I'm all about asking people, you know, how much freedom do you want to press in for?
And I'll be a stand with you in that, whatever it is you want to press in to.
Because I always think that there's more available.
And God wants to keep renewing us and healing us and helping us walk in our identity.
And this whole experience has been quite a revelation for me because I truly believe that deliverance is available for every child of God.
that his hope and dream for his children is that they walk in freedom and they walk in their identity.
And when I came to that realization, then I had to have a, I had to rethink a lot of my previous theology.
And that's been the journey that I've been on.
I mean, that's the whole thing is when you start to look at things like inner healing and deliverance, it forces you to revamp your views of God and the Holy Spirit.
When I'm doing emotional healing, I simply just invite Jesus into the interaction and say, look, Jesus is going to do this and He's going to do that for you.
And it's all about Him doing it.
And people get this different understanding of who Jesus is just from having Him take away their anxiety, take away their sadness and their anger.
And then they get a different view of who Jesus is.
And getting your understanding about who God is is so important.
It is.
So if people want to find you on social media and learn more about what you're up to, where can they find you?
Yeah, so I'm Theology Mom on Twitter and YouTube and on Facebook.
And then I also have a Facebook page called Real Life Spiritual Warfare where I post a lot of just practical spiritual warfare issues And on my YouTube channel, I've done a lot of teachings just equipping people in spiritual warfare issues in very practical ways just in everyday life of how do these things kind of Show up for people.
And right now I'm actually doing a series on marriage and spiritual warfare.
I just started that.
So I'm updating my YouTube channel all the time with short teachings to just equip people in very practical ways so they can have more freedom in their life.
That's really the goal.
That's awesome.
I'm glad to hear that.
OK, I will post links to your Facebook page, your Twitter profile, your YouTube channel, all of that in the podcast so people can find it.
Well, Krista, I'm going to let you go.
I have stuff I got to get done today.
It has been awesome finally talking to you and getting this interview down.
I think it's going to help a lot of people, set a lot of people free, and give them hope.
I hope so, and just know that God's vision for your life is to walk in freedom.
That's the plan that He has for you, and if you're not there, draw near to God, and He has promised to draw near to you.
All right.
Well, that is a good thought to part on.
Thanks for your time.
I appreciate it.
Thank you so much.
Bye-bye.
Okay.
Well, folks, that is our show for today.
I hope you enjoyed it.
Thanks for dropping by.
If you're new to the podcast and you haven't been to my website, you might drop by and check out the articles I have there.
If you have any questions or comments about the show, you can contact me at admin at prayingmedic.com.
